I don’t know about you, but kids not having the supplies they need to do their work drives me CRAZY! Crazy, I tell you. The problem is that I GIVE them everything they need. EVERYTHING and they lose it, eat it, leave it on the floor, claim, “It’s not mine!” and let their neighbor take it. So one kid has 6 pencils and another has none.

Enter Vodka.

Actually enter this brilliant idea! I flag my pencils with masking tape, write the child’s name on the pencil flag, and reward the child for keeping track of their pencils until they are all used up.

So what are you waiting for? Grab some masking tape and let’s do this. Simply wrap tape around the pencil and fold the tape back in on itself. Trim the edge for a nice clean finish. This is a great job for a parent volunteer. I have used many kinds of tape to make the flags. I have found that masking tape works best. It’s easy to work with, write on, and though it can rip, it is pretty durable! I keep about 100 at the ready all the time.

You can hand out the awards in many ways. I like to give a child an award when they use up a pencil. You can also surprise the class with a pencil check. Anyone who still has their pencil gets a responsibility award.

Hi, friends! It's Blair from One Lesson at a Time, here with a super fun and meaningful way to wrap up the school year with your kiddos. Best of all? Totally free! Whoop whoop!

It's the end of the year and the finish line is ahead of us - like a mirage in the distance. It's soooo close.....and yet, right up until the very last moments, also so very far away. The last few days most of us are fighting off daydreams of late mornings in bed & sunny afternoons at the pool - and making mental checklists of all the work we're going to get done over the summer, the PD hours to fill, etc. #letsbeserious

The last few days of school are the perfect time to reinforce the classroom community you’ve worked so hard to build. Even though most of our students share our enthusiasm for the end of the year on the outside, it can be easy to forget that for many of them - even for most of them - this transition time is one that comes with a degree of uncertainty and trepidation. What will my next teacher be like? Will I be in the same class as my friends? What am I going to do all summer? It's so important to give our kiddos time to reflect on their year – their growth, progress, and the relationships they’ve developed with their classmates.

I wanted to give my own students a way to share their favorite things about each other and create an easy but super meaningful parting gift for one another. I’ve used “class compliments” as a holiday gift before, and it was so successful that I decided I’d do it for the end of the year as well.

First, my students and I review how to give a good compliment:

Then we generate a list of character traits that we can use to compliment each other. After we create our own on chart paper, I pass out these charts for students to take back to their seats. If they’ve thought of more, they can add them to the back. We talk about how a really great compliment is about the person on the INSIDE, rather than the outside. Sure, it’s nice to tell people you like their shoes or you think they’re pretty, but it’s even nicer to comment on character traits.

Then, students get to work writing compliments to each and every one of their classmates. It’s a really nice way to spend an afternoon or two – I put the music on in the background and let the kids enjoy the warm fuzzy feelings that come from making others feel good. :)

After the students have all finished their compliments, I enlist a few of them to help me collate them. Each student’s compliments get slipped into a manilla envelope with a cover on the front. This is the most labor intensive part, and since doing this, I've thought of an infinitely smarter way and am now kicking myself.

So....allow me to save you a lot of time by doing not as I did, but as I thought of later:
•Put a stack of blank sheets on each student's desk.
•Put an envelope with the student's name on it on each desk.
•Have the studentsrotate throughout the room, writing compliments for each classmate when they sit at his or her desk.
•When they are finished writing a compliment, they simply slip it into the labeled envelope, which is already right there.
•Then, they move on to another desk.
•Slap Blair upside the head for collating these herself like a complete crazy person. *think, Blair, THINK!*

Whyyyyyyyy oh whyyyyyyyy don't I think of these things BEFORE doing them the hard way?!

Hand them out on the last day of school (no peeking!) for a meaningful gift from the heart for each and every student. Students will cherish their classmates’ words for years to come.

This activity is available for free in my TpT store - and last year I got some feedback on it that was so very powerful. I can't imagine the pain this student's family has gone through. But it is incredibly moving to know that his classmates' words were a source of comfort to them during a difficult time.

The activity is just a cute way of presenting students' own words. It's the words themselves that hold power and meaning. You don't need to print these pages to do something similar. (In fact, when I first started doing this, I've simply used cut-up scrap paper.) This feedback is such a strong reminder of how very important it is to teach students the power of words - not only that words can hurt, but also that our words can have an incredibly positive impact on the lives of others. This activity is simply one way to help teach that.

I am such a sucker for Valentine's Day stuff. The colors. The candy. The memories of trying to figure out what the choice of Garbage Pail Kids card meant from the boy I was crushing on... In my classroom, I definitely DOWNPLAY the love stuff with the holiday. I try to make it more of a friendship holiday - with pink, red, and hearts of course!

Just in case you are still looking for a quick Valentine's Day math activity, I made a short FREEBIE that includes 8 task cards for one step and two step word problems. It is perfectly aligned to the 2nd grade standards but could easily be used with some 1st graders and as a review for 3rd grade. You can pick it up for FREE by clicking here.

These ideas are ours. We joyfully share them with you to use in your own classroom, but never to claim as your own in any fashion. They are the intellectual property of each talented blogger represented here.